Dogpiling and Fandom

Contents

In the absence of legal options, dogpiling is a standard tool in online fannish communities for policing the behavior of fans who don't follow fannish etiquette.

For dogpiling to occur, a sufficient number of fans must either see the offending behavior directly (for example, in a LiveJournal community post or reblogged on Tumblr) or be notified of it by another angry fan.

Examples of Usage

"For a brief period (a bout 3 or 4 times total), I participated with my friends in dogpiling people in fandom that for some reason earned our ire. ( I think they said something mean to one of my friends, or they posted some opinion that we didn't agree with. Mind you this was before the whole SJ thing.

It felt really, really good. Addictively good. We were all in chat together commenting about the replies, and then going back to the post and just slaying the person. Whatever they said, we'd mock it, or argue with it, or twist it. There were about 8 of us participating, and it was soooo fun that we talked about it for hours after we'd been locked out the post. I felt so close to my friends and so utterly righteous, so clever and smart, and on.

Then one of my friends who had been sitting by and not participating, spoke out and said something to the effect of, "you know guys, this is really pretty awful. Are we really this big a bunch of douchebags? Everyone knows we hang together, and we are well known writers, we are going to get a reputation for being some kind of fandom BNF hit squad."

I didn't want to believe it at first, but we never dogpiled again, and after a few weeks of thinking, I looked back at my behavior and the way it made me feel, and the way it must have made the people we went after feel, and I still feel appalled.

I've been dogpiled since, but none of those times has made me feel even close to as bad as the way I feel about the times I was doing the dogpiling."[1]

"It's the fanficrants cycle. Someone will accidentally make an SJW blunder and get dogpiled, then will, in despair try to apologise and get dogpiled for that until it's no fucking wonder if they start sounding a bit defensive because who wouldn't."[2]

"I spent the year after RaceFail having anxiety dreams about people dogpiling my work - despite being a small name fan and not involved in the whole thing at all. I spent way, way too much time fretting about whether everything I wrote was -ist or not and never posting anything."[3]

"Yeah, socks are the best way to go if you really are anxious about SJW dogpiles. That way, IF you get dogpiled (which is unlikely), you can ignore it and continue on your regular fandom name."[4]

"If getting 77 kudos is a dogpile, then you can dogpile me anytime."[5]